Corporations which provide financial advice to clients and customers, either directly or through financial professionals, typically place a premium upon the delivery of consistent and complementary advice across the various channels that may be available for delivering such advice. Financial planners and planning organizations generally provide their customers with financial advice such as data, strategies, and recommendations. In addition to utilizing charts, graphs, and other visual aids for presenting this financial advice to clients, financial planners and planning organizations often use specialized calculators, simulators, formatters, and the like to augment the depth and quality of the proffered financial advice. Moreover, due to various Security and Exchange Commission, insurance, financial, legal, and other complex disclosure requirements, the financial data generated during the financial planning process should be appropriately archived, and the financial advice information delivered to the client should include the proper disclosures, disclaimers, and the like.
In addition to the disclosures and disclaimers that customers usually review and sign, financial advisors often enroll new or existing customers into new services or assist new or existing customers through application processes for financial products and services. Such enrolment and application processes often require the customer to complete one or more forms. Traditionally, financial advisors are equipped with a number of different paper forms geared to various types of financial products and services. A financial advisor may complete forms on behalf of the customer, however, the customer typically must sign forms to indicate acceptance of the information in the forms. This is most often a time consuming and tedious task. Further, when a financial advisor returns from the field, all forms and disclosures relating to a sale or change in financial services are turned over to data entry personnel. It is then the job of the data entry personnel to enter information from the forms into the appropriate database systems. This not only creates redundancy, but it creates a new layer for data entry errors to occur.
It therefore is desirable to create a system for managing applications, data and electronic forms in remote environments where a means for connecting to a financial services company computing center is either not conveniently present or not accessible. Additionally, it is desirable to provide a system for presenting forms electronically and collecting form data through a pen based PC, such as a tablet PC.